Chrome blamed for MacBook crashes, Google confirms issue

By Gene Ryan Briones on 06/28/2012 23:37 PDT

We’re adding another Google Chrome-related story before you go to bed tonight. But this one’s unfortunately negative. If your MacBook has been crashing lately, Gizmodo thinks that Google’s Chrome browser is to blame. Apparently the publication has been pointing out the freezing and crashing issues on MacBook Air models used by their staff. When they switched to Apple’s very own Safari browser, strangely, the issues were nowhere to be found.

Since then, the site has reportedly avoided using the browser and even recommended fellow MacBook owners to stop using it. While we did not experience the issues ourselves, Google reportedly issued a statement to Gizmodo confirming that its browser is the culprit. The folks over at Google explained that they were able to identify a “leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X”. Google said that its team is currently looking for the root cause of the leak. You can check out Google’s issued statement below.

We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome’s GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware.